Robbie Williams, Rudebox

It is hard to think of a recent release that has incurred quite the level of negative pre-publicity afforded Robbie Williams' seventh album. Coming hard on the heels of a world tour that began with Williams offering refunds to the entire audience at the opening show and ended with the singer apparently announcing his retirement from live performance, Rudebox has been billed as incontrovertible proof that the previously unstoppable Williams juggernaut has developed engine trouble. Here, it has been intimated, is the sound of Robbie Williams' big end going: an album so peculiar, so spectacularly misconceived, that it will decimate his fanbase at a stroke. "What a bizarre, baffling and downright strange record this is," howled one august music magazine.

Alas, would that Rudebox were that interesting. There are certainly moments when you wonder what on earth Williams thinks he's up to - not least a cover of world music star Manu Chao's novelty track Bongo Bong/Je Ne T'aime Plus that concludes with Williams doing a terrible impersonation of the French legend he recently namechecked in an interview as Serge Gainsborough - yet, for the most part, it turns out not to be bizarre, baffling or downright strange, but somehow inevitable. On his last album, Intensive Care, Williams' new co-writer Stephen Duffy apparently expunged the singer's desire to record the wretched jokey tracks that had peppered all his previous albums, like a musical equivalent of the tiresome array of gurns and knowing winks he employs onstage. Reviews were better, but in Britain at least, sales were not: the final single from Intensive Care, Sin Sin Sin, was the lowest-charting of Williams' career. The ensuing live dates, meanwhile, suggested that Williams' longing to be taken seriously as an artist and songwriter was precluded by his longing to perform Me And My Shadow à deux with Jonathan Wilkes, former presenter of ITV's You've Been Framed. Don't let Intensive Care fool you, seemed to be the message; I'm not done winking and gurning yet.

And so it proves. Despite a stellar cast list, including the Pet Shop Boys, Lily Allen, New York hip hop DJ Mark Ronson and producer William Orbit, Rudebox is an album that doesn't stop winking and gurning at you for over an hour. It throws a lot of musical styles at the wall: R&B, 80s cover versions and electro among them. But every time one of them looks like sticking, every time it threatens to hit a note of affecting seriousness (the brilliant, icy meditation on fame's corrupting power that is She's Madonna, a cover of New York electro act My Robot Friend's We're the Pet Shop Boys - a glorious homage to the power of music - or The Actor's skewed, slightly disturbing synth-pop) it quickly starts making with the pop-eyes and funny face: "We're mad, innit?" as Williams exclaims at one juncture. This, it scarcely needs saying, proves fantastically irritating, not least because the funny face usually takes the form of a novelty hip-hop track, often featuring the uniquely depressing sound of a white multimillionaire pop star rapping in Jamaican patois. Good Doctor finds Williams doing a terrible north-western approximation of Mike Skinner's vocal delivery. It's the Coronation Streets.

The kind thing to say would be that Rudebox exists in a long tradition of messy, risk-taking records that seem less like coherent albums than a kind of musical miscellany in search of an editor: the Beatles' White Album, Fleetwood Mac's Tusk and the Clash's Sandinsta! among them. But you feel fairly daft implying that Williams' limp cover of Stephen Duffy's 80s pop hit Kiss Me somehow drinks from the same stream of inspiration as Dear Prudence or Somebody Got Murdered, and, in any case, it's hard to think of a song more likely to curb the listener's generosity of spirit than Rudebox's closing "secret" track, Dickhead. A woeful sub-Eminem rant, it features Williams gallantly threatening to set his retinue of bouncers on anyone who dares to criticise his music. By the time it concludes, puzzlingly, with the singer shouting "I've got a bucket of shit! I've got a bucket of shit!", one feels less inclined to say the kind thing than the cruel thing: you don't need to tell me that, pal, I've just spent the last hour examining it.

In truth, Rudebox doesn't deserve such opprobrium. If it's unlikely to confound fans of Captain Beefheart with its edginess and experimental verve, the mind still boggles at what Williams' core audience - the mums, the Heat readers, the couples who buy two CDs a year from Tesco - will make of it. A scant handful of highlights aside, it is packed with half-baked ideas, bad jokes, music that any other star of Williams' stature would be terrified of the general public hearing. Perhaps that's the point. If nothing else, Rudebox is a sharp reminder that Robbie Williams is unique.